THEATER REVIEW: 'Beauty Queen' revival is one mother of a show

Monday

Feb 13, 2017 at 3:39 PMFeb 14, 2017 at 1:08 PM

By R. Scott Reedy, Daily News Correspondent

BOSTON - When it comes to Mag Folan – the relentlessly selfish mother at the center of Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s brilliant “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” now on a 20th anniversary tour stop at the Emerson/Paramount Center – you never have to wonder whether something might be bothering her.

She makes sure you know. Repeated mentions of the temperature of her porridge and the pesky lumps in her powdered milk drink are among the verbal cudgels the wizened old woman uses to continuously poke at her caretaker daughter, the 40-year-old unmarried Maureen, ensuring that there are few, if any, moments of peace in the very modest cottage they share in the Connemara village of Leenane.

McDonagh’s searing, often humorous tale of a long-simmering mother-and-daughter face-off received its world premiere in a Druid Theatre Company production that opened Feb. 1, 1996, at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway. The first in the Leenane trilogy that includes “A Skull in Connemara” and “The Lonesome West,” the drama toured Ireland extensively and played two engagements in London’s West End.

It opened off-Broadway on Feb. 11, 1998, at the Atlantic Theatre Company’s Linda Gross Theatre before transferring to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre two months later, where it would receive six Tony Award nominations, winning four including best actress for Marie Mullen as Maureen, and best director for Garry Hynes, the first female recipient in this category.

Hynes is once again at the helm in this superb new Druid mounting, with the estimable Mullen now tackling the role of Mag. Anyone who saw “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” on Broadway will always remember Mullen as Maureen, the heart of that heartbreaking production. Equally unforgettable was the magnificent Anna Manahan, who took home the best featured actress in a play Tony Award for her portrayal of Mag – planted at the kitchen table like a human anvil making the other characters move around her because she wasn’t going anywhere.

Under Hynes’s expert direction, Mullen’s Mag is more mobile, spilling her persistent menace on everyone and everything in her path. A scalded hand does not slow her. Even as she whiles away the time in her rocker, this malevolent mother is never really at rest. With every sway, she’s plotting to get her own way and keep her daughter under her thumb. Seldom seated at all – save for a few idyllic moments in the lap of a suitor in act one – the always on-guard Maureen is well played by Aisling O’Sullivan with equal parts of aching loneliness and braying ferocity.

The coldness of her mother and the harshness of their life have deprived Maureen of lasting happiness, but in O’Sullivan’s hands she appears to have just a glimmer of hope left. That comes, most persuasively, in act one when she manages to override her mother’s callous interference to grab one blissful night with the shy Pato Dooley, warmly portrayed by Marty Rea.

The act two opener with Pato, working construction in London and planning a move to Boston, reading his plainly written yet perfectly worded letter to Maureen expressing his plans and hopes for their future, provides the show with one of its most gently affecting moments.

Rounding out the splendid cast is the pitch-perfect Aaron Monaghan, who provides welcome comic leavening as Pato’s brother, Ray Dooley. When Pato dispatches Ray to deliver his letter with the explicit instruction that he must put it in the hand of Maureen, Ray finds himself alone with Mag, who, with no sign of Maureen in sight, soon has him pounding his head on the kitchen table and repeating, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here.”

Like Hynes and Mullen, original set and costume designer Francis O’Connor has returned for this production. His costuming is a good fit for each character, except maybe for Pato’s too well-tailored suit in act one. O’Connor has opened up his memorably confining Broadway set here while still keeping it very much of its time and place.

The overcast sky outside, where it’s so often raining, reminds us that bleakness isn’t always endurable, nor escapable. Sometimes it can overwhelm even those who have long lived with it.